Episode 8: £18m Government boost for Billingham lithium refinery, South Gare's biggest ever works, and the O&M firm hiring a hundred locals

Transcript

DARREN: Welcome to the Teesside Trade Podcast, the weekly show covering construction, trades and property across the Tees Valley. I'm Darren Turnbull.

TERRY: And I'm Terry Oakes. The week's news, a local firm worth knowing, and one practical tip.

DARREN: And the week starts with serious money. Tees Valley Lithium has been offered up to eighteen point three million pounds of Government funding towards its planned hundred and eighty-five million pound refinery at the Billingham Chemical Complex.

TERRY: That's the battery-grade lithium plant.

DARREN: It is. Alkemy Capital Investments, the London-listed owner, announced the offer in principle from the DRIVE thirty-five Automotive Transformation Fund on Wednesday the seventeenth. Phase one is designed to produce twenty-five thousand tonnes a year of battery-grade lithium hydroxide — enough for more than half a million electric vehicles annually — with later phases scaling past a hundred thousand tonnes.

TERRY: And the bit our listeners care about?

DARREN: Around one thousand one hundred jobs during construction, sixty-six direct roles, and over five hundred in the wider supply chain. The company reckons the plant adds more than two point one billion pounds to the UK economy over twenty-five years, about half of it in the Tees Valley. Site prep, civils, structural steel and process piping lead the early packages — and it's a live chemical site, so scaffolders and sparks stay busy throughout.

TERRY: Same labour pool as Teesworks and Net Zero Teesside, mind. Competition for skilled hands stays fierce.

DARREN: Second story, down at the river mouth. PD Ports has started one of the largest engineering programmes ever undertaken on the South Gare breakwater — a multi-million-pound scheme to strengthen the structure against increasingly severe storms.

TERRY: The breakwater's been there over a hundred and fifty years.

DARREN: And these are the largest works since it was built. Phase one puts around fifteen thousand tonnes of high-density granite, shipped from Norway, around the base of the structure — individual rocks two point five metres across and up to thirty tonnes each, placed mostly below the waterline by a specialist installation barge. The contractors are McLaughlin and Harvey, working with Herbosch-Kiere. Another forty thousand tonnes follows in a second phase next summer.

TERRY: Properly engineered, too — eighteen months of surveys and a one-in-fifty scale model tested against a one-in-two-hundred-year storm. Marine civils on that scale means barges, divers, surveyors and quarry supply chains for two summers running.

DARREN: Third, a look further ahead. The Government has directed UK regulators to begin the Generic Design Assessment of the X-energy Xe one hundred — the advanced modular reactor that X-energy and Centrica want to build at Hartlepool.

TERRY: That's the next-generation nuclear plant.

DARREN: Hartlepool is the preferred first site for a planned UK fleet of up to six gigawatts, and the existing A G R station there is due to close in twenty thirty. It's early days — this is design assessment, not consent — but specialist firms are already engaged on site studies, and a Nuclear and Electrical Trades Academy has launched in Hartlepool. The skills pipeline is being built before a spade hits the ground.

TERRY: Which brings us to segment two, this week's local firm: p x Group.

DARREN: Thornaby-based, and a Teesside employer for more than twenty-five years. They're an operations and maintenance specialist — the people who run plants, not just build them. They've recently moved into Boaz House on Teesdale Business Park in Stockton, over thirty thousand square feet of offices.

TERRY: And they've just landed the big one.

DARREN: They have. Back in March, N Z T Power and the Northern Endurance Partnership appointed p x to operate and maintain two cornerstone facilities — the carbon capture plant at N Z T Power, and N E P's full onshore C O two compression facility. It's an initial five-year agreement, and p x is recruiting an on-site team of around a hundred people locally, apprentices included, working with Cogent Skills on training and qualifications.

TERRY: N E P called it one of the most significant industrial operations appointments in Teesside's recent history. And the p x chief executive Geoff Holmes has said safe operations are non-negotiable on projects like these.

DARREN: It checks out on Companies House too — p x Limited, incorporated in two thousand and two, active and filing on time. The takeaway is the shape of it: when the builders finish, somebody runs these plants for decades, and that somebody is increasingly a firm with a Teesside postcode.

TERRY: Final segment. This week's tip: follow the operator, not just the builder.

DARREN: Construction peaks come and go. The lithium refinery will have its eleven hundred construction jobs, then settle to sixty-six permanent roles. But operations and maintenance contracts — like p x's five-year deal — run for years and renew. Commissioning support, handover snagging, planned maintenance, small works — that pipeline never switches off.

TERRY: So if you're an electrical, mechanical or instrumentation firm, don't just chase the main contractor's build packages. Find out who's operating the plant afterwards, get on their vendor lists early, and be the firm they call in year three. The build is the sprint — operations is the annuity.

DARREN: That's it for this week. Sources and links for every story are in the show notes at teessidetradepodcast dot co dot uk.

TERRY: And if you know a Teesside firm we should profile, get in touch through the site. See you next Monday.